Comparison
Nexus vs Grafana for AI Agent Observability
Grafana is the default monitoring stack for many indie developers — powerful, open-source, and deeply flexible. But it was built for infrastructure metrics, not AI agent traces. Here's an honest comparison for developers building AI agents.
TL;DR
Choose Nexus if you…
- ✓ Are building AI agents and want a zero-config hosted dashboard
- ✓ Want agent-native views: per-agent error rates, span waterfalls, LLM cost per run
- ✓ Don't want to manage Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, or Grafana self-hosting
- ✓ Want predictable pricing at $9/mo flat — no per-seat or volume charges
Choose Grafana if you…
- ✓ Already run a Grafana + Prometheus + Loki stack across your infra
- ✓ Need to monitor both infrastructure and AI agents in one unified platform
- ✓ Have a DevOps team comfortable maintaining Grafana dashboards and configs
- ✓ Need deep custom dashboarding and alerting rules across all services
Feature Comparison
| Feature | Nexus | Grafana |
|---|---|---|
| Primary focus | AI agent observability | Infrastructure & app metrics / logs |
| Self-hosting required | ✓ Fully managed SaaS | ✗ Self-hosted (OSS) or Grafana Cloud ($) |
| Agent-first dashboard | ✓ Per-agent health, error rates, 7d trends | ✗ Requires custom dashboard setup |
| LLM token cost tracking | ✓ Per-span cost, per-agent cost rollups | ✗ No native LLM cost model |
| Trace span waterfall | ✓ Nested span waterfall per trace | ✓ Grafana Tempo (requires separate setup) |
| Setup time | 5 min — one API call to start tracing | Hours to days (infra + dashboards + alerts) |
| Webhook / email alerts | ✓ Included on Pro plan | ✓ Grafana Alerting (self-managed rules) |
| Infrastructure monitoring | ✗ AI traces only | ✓ Full metrics, logs, traces across all services |
| Pricing | Free tier + $9/mo flat (Pro) | Free (self-hosted) or Grafana Cloud from $0—$299+/mo |
| TypeScript SDK | ✓ First-class TypeScript support | Via OTel SDK (additional config) |
The honest take
Grafana is exceptional monitoring infrastructure — battle-tested, highly extensible, and capable of unifying metrics, logs, and traces across every service you run. If your team already operates a Grafana stack with Prometheus for metrics, Loki for logs, and Tempo for traces, it's completely reasonable to route your AI agent spans into Tempo and build a custom dashboard. You retain full control and everything lives in one place.
The tradeoff is setup cost. Getting useful AI agent monitoring in Grafana means configuring Tempo for trace ingestion, writing PromQL or LogQL queries for LLM-specific fields, and building dashboards that understand concepts like “span type: LLM call” or “agent run cost.” None of that exists out of the box — you build it yourself. For a team whose primary concern is infrastructure observability, that's fine. For a solo developer or small team whose primary concern is AI agent health, it's significant overhead.
Nexus is purpose-built for the agent use case. It ingests structured trace and span data through a simple REST API, models each agent as a first-class entity, and surfaces per-agent error rates, run durations, LLM token costs, and 7-day health trends — without any dashboard configuration. The span waterfall is automatic. Token costs are calculated from the model and usage fields in each span. Alerts fire via webhook or email when error rates spike, with no alert rule authoring required.
The honest split: if you need to monitor your AI agents alongside Kubernetes clusters, databases, and application servers in a single pane of glass — Grafana is worth the setup cost. If you're building AI-first and want observability running in five minutes — Nexus is the faster path.
Monitor your agents in real time
Agent-first observability. Free tier, no credit card required. Start tracing in 5 minutes — full span waterfall, LLM cost tracking, and per-agent health dashboards included.